Emmanuelle Pellet - Illusions perdues

Emmanuelle Pellet - Lost Illusions
Acrylic painting - Original signed - 2009
H: 20.9 cm W: 28.7 cm

About the work:
On a muted red background, evoking a theatre curtain, an elderly woman with a poofy hairstyle contemplates a hand mirror. But the reflection does not return her own face: it is that of a laughing child, with round cheeks and a clear gaze, facing her on an acid green background.

This substitution, typically surreal in its method—the mirror as a doorway to another world—places the work in the lineage of Magritte or Dalí, while remaining firmly contemporary in its execution: boldly drawn, almost caricatured, for the woman's face, against a nearly photographic smoothness for the child's face. This stylistic telescoping heightens the temporal rupture staged.

The title plays on this ambiguity: the illusion of a time past, or the illusion that something of this child still survives beneath the aged face. A chromatic economy—red, deep blue, green—concentrates all the tension of the work on this impossible face-off.

To the viewer to let their imagination roam to decide what is at stake in this face-off.

About the artist
A trained art historian, Emmanuelle Pellet studied at the École du Louvre and then at the Sorbonne before passing the Agrégation in plastic arts (3rd place). After several years of teaching, she joined the Louvre Museum as head of educational outreach.
Her works have been exhibited in galleries in Paris, London, Singapore and Mauritius. They have been the subject of numerous publications and are now in private collections in Europe, North America, Asia, and the Indian Ocean.